Growing up I used to watch the BBC TV programme
Tomorrow's world and
was in awe of the amazing futuristic houses and gadgets. At
University I wired up our doorbell to our Novell Netware server so in
our shared house we could all know someone was at the door; although
being students it didn't make anyone get up to answer it. When I bought by own house I was
determined to see what home gadgets would actually be useful and fun.
There are many, many existing home automation systems at all price
ranges, but most are based on Windows. It seemed much more fun to
experiment for myself and implement some home automation for our
house on a small budget. And the final requirement was that everything
would run on Linux or open source software -- I didn't want to risk my house on an instable
OS that I had no control over.

My system has been running since 2001 and I've documented a few
of the projects, failed attempts, and software here.